Affinities Identify the Most Engaging Content and Personalities on YouTube

Channels with the highest brand affinity outperform channels based on genre and subscriber count

AffinityAnswers is not just for tracking brands; advertisers can also find which YouTube channels – based on the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter behaviors of the channels’ fans – have high affinity for their brand.

This level of insight was key for a video platform working with a CPG client that needed to extend its reach on YouTube beyond those that they chose based on relevant genres and the number of subscribers. AffinityAnswers created brand rankers to demonstrate which channels would be best, pinpointing those that had not already been chosen by the video platform.

In addition to executing the campaign in service of the client, the work with AffinityAnswers also acted as an experiment – which method of selecting YouTube channels is most effective at generating view-through rates?

The results were clear: while the genre-and-subscriber method produced a healthy view-through rate (35%), affinity-based selections boosted this by 23%, boosting the overall view-through rate to 43%. Choosing YouTube channels based on social engagement is a powerful method which, for branding campaigns, has proven more effective than choosing them based on actual viewership.